This one comes very near to finishing the GUI rework, which has been my main focus for about a week. There’s essentially a little bit of cleanup left to do, and then one last control (the “grid view”), which is only used on a single screen (the commodities inventory).
I think that you’ll find the interface in this one to be a night and day difference with prior versions. All the graphics are pretty much the same except for the text, and none of the functionality has been changed, but just having the text better colored and sized and bordered is an immense aid to readability. Spell descriptions no longer feel so spreadsheet-ish, for instance. And the chat box in multiplayer will no longer make you want to rip your hair out.
Monster Stuff
More exciting from a gameplay standpoint, however, is the work that Keith has been doing during this time. Multi-part monsters and multi-form monsters are two major additions to the game, and we’ve got a few salient examples already added.
The crippled dragon has been updated so that it can now start flying from time to time after a certain level is reached, which is an example of a multi-form monster.
The urban predator has been updated to have three missile bays that you can shoot (and which shoot at you independently of the main body), which is our first example of a multi-part monster. The missile bays actually make it harder to hit the main body, adding some degree of protection for it; but at the same time, shooting the missile bays jams them, so suddenly you have a lot more tactical choices at your disposal when attacking this enemy.
Next there’s an all-new enemy called the urban crawler. If you want to experience it in-game without any spoilers, then skip reading that section of the release notes, as they give rather detailed descriptions of it. This is by far our most complex enemy ever in this game, and it’s a great example of all sorts of new capabilities that we’ll be able to extend to future enemies that we add, too.
Hazards
The first of the new hazards has also been added to the game. These come in the form of stinging nettles, which you’ll start encountering in the swamps. There’s going to be a lot more hazards coming up, but for now that’s a good start down that road (mainly considering how distracted we’ve been with the monster logic and the GUI for the last week).
More to come soon — and actually, there’s a number of other things in the release notes that I didn’t even touch on, like a new ambient music track for the desert. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you’ll see the notice of the update having been found
if you’re connected to the Internet at the time. If you don’t have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
